Aerospace Advantage-Competitiveness Internals

Aerospace Advantage-Key to Hege

In shaping the international environment, the United States must possess a credible military force where military activities include overseas presence and peacetime engagement and the will to use military force.2 According to the NDP, overseas presence is the key to a stable international environment.3 Peacetime engagement includes rotational deployments that help sustain regional stability by deterring aggression and exercises with foreign nations that solidify relations with those nations.4Deployments and exercises both require air mobility in the form of both airlift and air refueling in order to trans- port the necessary troops and equipment. Peacetime engagement also includes other programs such as the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program where the United States assists members of the Commonwealth of Independent States in dismantling and storing WMD.5Here, air mobility is the lead component by transporting nuclear weapons to the United States from compliant nations. Airlift also plays a crucial role in responding to threats and crises by enhancing our war-fighting capability.6 The United States may move some forces nearer to a theater in crisis and rapidly deploy other forces into that theater. Depending on the crisis, forces from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or any combination of military personnel and equipment could comprise the force structure required. Consequently, the United States must airlift these forces along with the needed logistics support. In addition, the focused logistics concept of Joint Vision 2010 requires the transportation of supplies and materials to support these forces within hours or days rather than weeks, a mission solely suited to air mobility. In responding to crises, forces may deploy in support of smaller-scale contingencies which include humanitarian assistance, peace operations, enforcing NFZs, evacuating US citizens, reinforcing key allies, limited strikes, and interventions.7 Today, US forces find themselves globally engaged in responding to these contingencies more frequently and maintain longer-term commitments to support these contingencies. In these situations, many deployments occur in the absence of forward basing.8 The loss of forward basing has reduced AMC’s worldwide infrastructure from 39 locations in 1992 to 12 in 1999.9 Thus, the United States must again use air mobility to deploy forces overseas in a minimum amount of time for an operation to be successful.